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Category Archives: Interesting Nuggets

To the Squirrels, Re: Ghosts

[…]publishing the essays that make up Cunning Plans allowed Ellis to move on from the concerns expressed in the book before he became “an obsessed old man living in a shack in the woods and screaming at the squirrels about ghosts,” he says. Spoken like an artist that’s concerned about the future. As he writes […]

Please Take the Other Pen

The reason I’m disappointed by almost every conversation is because I have such a high view of the revolutionary power it can have—and such a belief, probably childlike, in the magic of words. In some sense, I’m always putting too much pressure on it to deliver. But at the same time, I strongly believe that […]

Utopia in the Blood Surrogate

After his expulsion from the [Communist] party in 1909, he founded a Utopian school for workers on the island of Capri, but became deeply apolitical around this time, serving in World War One as a doctor, and having an elliptical impact on Soviet Russian politics and philosophy after the War. It is clear that his […]

Loosely, A Star

Word of the day is “asterism.” Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as: A group or cluster of stars; a constellation. loosely, A star, or anything shaped like one. A group of three asterisks placed thus (⁂) to direct attention to a particular passage. Rarely, a single asterisk (*) so used. Min. (Also in modern […]

I Never Did Intend Murder

In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, the design on my part to free the slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter, when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun […]

Esprit de Bureaucratie

Once effectively dehumanized, and hence cancelled as potential subjects of moral demands, human objects of bureaucratic task-performance are viewed with ethical indifference, which soon turns into disapprobation and censure when their resistance, or lack of cooperation, slows down the smooth flow of bureaucratic routine. Dehumanized objects cannot possibly possess a ’cause’, much less a ‘just’, […]

Only Ever One Gonzo Writer, and He’s Dead

I think some people who do this think they are being “gonzo,” but they are just being “asshole.” There was, truly, only ever one gonzo writer, and he’s dead. Even when he was alive he didn’t act like some overcompensating pseudo-macho prick in his writing. He insulted the powerful and deserving. He didn’t try to […]

Linkdump June

http://fractalontology.wordpress.com/ – Fractal Ontology http://muse.jhu.edu/ (my access is provided via the University of Maryland, may not be as useful out in the webranges) http://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/77938/1/the-edupunks-guide-to-a-diy-credential – The Edupunk’s guide to a DIY credential http://www.designboom.com/design/duck-bill-dog-muzzles-by-oppo/ – dog beaks, dogs with beaks, subject closed. http://ltrc.iiit.ac.in/nlp-lpl-08/proc/index.html – Proceedings of the IJCNLP-08 Workshop on NLP for Less Privileged Languages http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/index.html – […]

We All Expect You

What is needed is constant work, day and night, constant reading, study, will…. Every hour is precious for it…. Come to us, smash the vodka bottle, lie down and read…. Turgenev, if you like, whom you have not read. You must drop your vanity, you are not a child … you will soon be thirty. […]

From Each Open Tab

Settle a bet? Music or the smell of good cooking may make people stop and enjoy. Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. Its bitter heart may be tenanted now by black and white ants, but its odorous leaves were once […]